Canadian (born in Austria), 1897–1988

Mirage, 1971

graphite on paper

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Ernest Lindner left his native Vienna after having served in World War I. He settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1926, where he taught art at a technical high school until 1962. Placing the nude in the landscape setting was an established tradition in Canadian art, one that began with painters like Edwin Holgate and continued after Lindner with artists like Alex Colville. In Mirage the head and torso of a nude female figure are translucently superimposed over a lake and forest; the figure appears to rise into a cloudy sky. Equally striking, the figure’s forearms rest impossibly over her breast, grasping opposite shoulders, and at her sides. The overlapping and blurring of discrete subject matter was, for Lindner, a way of representing life—normally fluctuating and separated by time and space—as a single, interconnected moment.